That yester morn bloomed waving in the breeze.
Sounds the most faint attract the ear, – the hum
Of early bee, the trickling of the dew,
The distant bleating, midway up the hill.
With dove-like wings, Peace o’er yon village broods:
The dizzying mill-wheel rests; the anvil’s din
Hath ceased; all, all around is quietness.
Less fearful on this day, the limping hare
Stops, and looks back, and stops, and looks on man
Her deadliest foe. The toilworn horse, set free,
Unheedful of the pasture, roams at large;
And as his stiff unwieldly bulk rolls on,
His iron-armed hoofs gleam in the morning ray.
So the Scottish poet James Graham begins his poem The Sabbath (1804). All this island over, there was a hush of feudal quiet in the country on a Sunday. We must sink into this quiet to understand and tolerate, with our democratic minds, the graded village hierarchy, graded by birth and occupation, by clothes and by seating in the church. It is an agricultural world as yet little touched by the machines which were starting in the mills of the midlands and the north. The Sabbath as a day of rest and worship touched all classes. Our feeblest poets rose from bathos to sing its praises. I doubt if Felicia Hemens ever wrote better than this, in her last poem (1835), composed less than a week before she died.
How many blessed groups this hour are bending,
Through England’s primrose meadow paths, their way
Towards spire and tower, midst shadowy elms ascending,
Whence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallowed day:
The halls from old heroic ages grey
Pour their fair children forth; and hamlets low,
With whose thick orchard blooms the soft winds play,
Send out their inmates in a happy flow,
Like a freed rural stream.
I may not tread
With them those pathways, – to the feverish bed
Of sickness bound, – yet, O my God, I bless
Thy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath filled
My chastened heart, and all its throbbings stilled
To one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.
One is inclined, seeing the pale whites and ochres and greys, relieved here and there with the warm brown red of local bricks, which we associate today with Georgian England, to forget how highly coloured were the clothes of the people. Thomas Hood’s early poem The Two Peacocks at Bedfont (1827) describes with the colours of an aquatint the worshippers entering that then countrified Middlesex church:
So speaking, they pursue the pebbly walk
That leads to the white porch the Sunday throng,
Hand-coupled urchins in restrained talk,
And anxious pedagogue that chasten wrong,
And posied churchwarden with solemn stalk,
And gold-bedizened beadle flames along,
And gentle peasant clad in buff and green,
Like a meek cowslip in the spring serene;
And blushing maiden – modestly array’d
In spotless white – still conscious of the glass;
And she, the lonely widow that hath made
A sable covenant with grief, – alas!
She veils her tears under the deep, deep shade,
While the poor kindly-hearted, as they pass,
Bend to unclouded childhood, and caress
Her boy, – so rosy! – and so fatherless!
Thus as good Christians ought, they all draw near
The fair white temple, to the timely call
Of pleasant bells that tremble in the ear, –
Now the last frock, and scarlet hood and shawl
